Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Freddie Mercury, Kenny Everett and Princess Diana walk into a bar. It sounds like the start of a particularly naughty joke, but this peculiar trio really did assemble in a south London gay pub in 1988, each seeking respite from moments of personal turmoil.

This fantastical story, the sort of thing you’d be mistaken for imagining was conjured in the mind of a budding drag queen in the early Nineties, first came to attention courtesy of Cleo Rocos, Everett’s right-hand-woman throughout the Eighties. Writing in her 1998 memoir, Rocos recalled a night 10 years earlier in which she, Everett and the Queen frontman were watched The Golden Girls with the Princess before Diana, in so-called “mischief...